On the Horizon

There's something weird about how straight male doctors and medical technicians move my hair when they are examining my neck and/or shoulders.  It's not a bit like Max the psychic life coach and hairdresser touches it.  Max is totally professional, efficient and matter-of-fact.  The technician who managed the X-rays of my shoulder today lingered just a bit too long.

I probably shouldn't have said, "I wish," when he asked me if there was any chance I was pregnant.  But the doctor I saw back in March seemed almost reverential when he lifted it gently off my shoulders and smoothed it on either side of my neck to look at my spine.  It seemed unusual at the time.  The doctor I saw last Wednesday, who may be a lesbian but I don't really know, just brushed it out of the way with professional efficiency just like Max.

The technician today wasn't creepy or anything. He just lingered, and I got the feeling he'd have fucked me right there in the X-ray room.  That might have been my imagination, though.  I'm feeling kind of sexy these days because I've lost ten pounds since I went on the anti-infammation diet the nutritionist recommended.  I haven't been totally detoxing since last week when I got that tooth pulled, I had champagne and mango sorbet for dinner a few nights in a row as well as some little 100 calorie chocolate bars from Trader Joe's.

I've been walking a lot lately, though, making home visits to the kids in my class this year.  I love home visits because it's fun to stomp around the Upper West Side with my assistant looking at everyone's apartment - although we do get apartment envy sometimes and can never quite understand what the heck all these people are doing so that they have enough money to afford these lovely apartments.  Then Comrade Kevin and I did a lot of walking while he was here over the weekend looking at stuff.

Walking is my favorite exercise - besides getting high and stretching on my pilates ball, which I haven't done lately because I'm a little afraid I'll hurt myself since the shoulder has been out of whack.  I did do some balancing last week now that the ball is blown up again.  My dad deflated it when I moved in June, and it's still not fully inflated because I'm pacing myself.  My shoulder has been steadily improving and I haven't wanted to over-do it.

I was able to get in push-up position on it and hold myself steady, distributing my weight equally between each arm while I lifted my legs straight out behind me.   Kind of like this:

I wasn't on that much of an incline, but I still did it.  I wouldn't even have attempted it a couple of months ago.

I'm especially excited because Gwendolyn Holden Barry, from Daughters of Isis, has mixed up a healing potion specially for me.  She noticed something I said here on the blog a while back about how I thought that petrochemicals in the environment when I was growing up contributed to my Morphea Scleroderma, so she wrote me on Facebook said that if I could get some of the soil from the old neighborhood, she thought she could develop a homeopathic remedy.  As it happened, I was going to Houston the next week. One afternoon, my sister-in-law drove me over to our old house and we were able to get a few spoonfuls without being noticed.  Except we used sticks to dig, and I used my bare hands to collect the dirt.  It's been so dry in Houston with the drought and all that the soil was baked and hard.  

My mother was initially concerned about Agent Orange in the dirt on account of all the weed killer folks spray around there, but I figured that if there was that much Agent Orange in the environment, it was already in the drinking water - so What the Hell?

Gwendolyn just put the potion in the mail, and it should be here by the weekend. Gwen is a blogger (a new global myth), and she does a blogtalk radio called Here Be Monsters.  Years ago, she studied mythology with Joseph Campbell at Columbia.  That's cool in and of itself - and as a result, she wound up following her bliss to Ancestor Aromachologie.   She says the worst thing that can happen from using the potion is that I'll be drinking a little dirt.  That's not nearly as bad as running behind the DDT truck when they sprayed the mosquitoes back in Beaumont when we were kids.

I'm sure that when Velvet is home this weekend and hears about the potion he's going to start up the Witch accusations again, and when he does I'll tell him that Witches were the original healers until the dang Romans chased our ancestors into the woods and demonized them.  Patriarchal Dick Wads.

Velvet is coming home specifically to spend time with Cup Cake.  He was just here over Labor Day, so I'm thinking that there's a 50/50 chance he'll wind up going to school here in the city next year.   I've been impressed by how well those two have managed their whole relationship.  Sometimes I think they may very well be one of those couples that get together in High School and stay together their whole lives.

He could do worse.